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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

I'm glad that I am reading Charles Martin's books backwards in order of publication, because I may not have continued had I started with his first, The Dead Don't Dance. His characters are very likeable (although after reading three Martin books, I see that the protagonist is basically the same guy in all three) and the story itself is sweet, but...there's certainly a reason why he received 86 rejection letters before Thomas Nelson Publishers finally picked this one up. His writing oozes sentimentality and cliches. I said this same thing about Wrapped in Rain: he puts in too many tangential slices that distract the reader from the story without adding anything at all. I was irritated by this and skipped several paragraphs and even pages of stories he should have chopped out. (Don't tell me about pigs! Get back to the story!)

So, this is very light reading; again, great for a day when you need something happy and don't mind some sappiness. Martin is an author who absolutely improves with each book. When Crickets Cry was really excellent, and I look for more good things to come from him.

This book by Sandra Dallas is perfect vacation reading material. Through a series of letters to her sister, Alice relates her experiences as a young Civil War bride whose husband goes off to war. The letters are filled with accounts of quilting, farm life, customs of small-town America, war hardship, and Alice's own coming-of-age. Each chapter begins with a short description of various types of quilts and their meanings, which I found particularly interesting. There's nothing heavy or intense here, just a light summer read.

Monday, July 30, 2007

This book by Alex Kotlowitz (author of the best-selling There Are No Children Here) is praised by Kirkus Reviews as being "A powerful record of an untimely death in middle America." The disappointment is that this is not a particularly powerful nor compelling book, although the subject matter certainly is compelling. This nonfiction account is of two cities in Michigan: lily-white and rich St. Joseph and poverty-stricken and black Benton Harbor, just across the river. This could have been a powerful book because the contrast between these two towns is fascinating; however, Kotlowitz stumbles as a writer, taking the long way about and leaving a maze of jumbled stories. I couldn't help but compare this to John Grisham's The Innocent Man, which follows a similar story of injustice and an unsolved crime. Where Grisham uses his storytelling skills to make his nonfiction account read like a mystery as well as a social commentary, Kotlowitz's story lacks the kind of personal close-ups that makes for a gripping tale. He could have done a lot more to make the reader know the characters on a deeper level.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

This short novel by Edith Wharton stands my test of time: I loved it upon my first reading in high school, then again in college, and now as a full-fledged adult. (Yes, I really do consider myself a full-fledged adult for the most part.) It has all the elements of a good novel: a man who struggles with his identity, a love triangle, a moral crisis, and a healthy dose of irony. The story is as stark as its New England setting. You can't help but root for Ethan, mentally urging him to shed his tedious life and marriage of convenience, in spite of the moral dilemma posed. The ending throws a twist that I had forgotten and so enjoyed all over again. Ethan Frome has now made it to the short list of books for my American Lit class next year. I'm hoping that the 1993 movie is appropriate for teens; I'll put that on my summer watching list.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

1. Curious about how many of the "1001 Books to Read Before You Die" that you've read? I was. I've read 121 of them, or 12.09%. I'll have to read 29 of these books each year in order to read them all before I die. What this chart doesn't tell me is exactly how and when I'll die, although it apparently knows. Also, I'm not sure who Peter Boxall is or why he is the Master of All Books, but it is fun to download this chart and see what an uneducated loser you are.

2. Paperback Swap is fun. See my little linky box on my sidebar? If you click on that, it'll take you to Paperback Swap. What you do is find 10 books in your house that you are ready to give away, and you list them here. Then you get to pick out 3 books for free. It really is fun! Of course, you have to be ready to send your book(s) when requested. Paperback Swap makes this very easy by automatically generating the mailing label for you. You pay the postage, which currently is $2.13 media rate. Every time someone receives one of your books, you get to pick out another book. Is this a good deal for a book? Not necessarily. You can go to a thrift store and buy a book for a quarter. But I've been able to find a bunch of books on my reading list this way, and I so enjoy getting packages in the mail.

3. People often ask me where I find book titles to read. My new favorite place is through Sherry at Semicolon. (This is Judy D's sister, for all you Local Yokels.) Not only does she have interesting book reviews of her own several times each week, but she has a great weekly column called the Saturday Review of Books. You can check her blog every Saturday to see new reviews by 75 or so bloggers, or you can just go to her running list of Saturday Reviews. My reading list has greatly expanded since I've been a regular reader there. And if that isn't enough for you, she has a big list of Book Blogs on her sidebar.* Another way I like to get books is by perusing Listmania at amazon.com. Just do a search for one of your favorite books, and look at the sidebars or at the bottom to see what the Listmania selections are.* I've gotten great ideas from the Bibliovores forum at the Sonlight boards. This might be one of the private access forums, but if you spend a lot of money at Sonlight, you can read the "What Did You Read" each month reviews, which are always enlightening.* And finally, my friends give me great book ideas! We are always saying, "GIve me a good book for my trip!" or "You've got to read this!"

4. And speaking of trips, here is what I am taking to read on my upcoming trip to New York (assuming I'll finish Harry Potter withing the next few days before I leave) (and assuming we'll have a rental van within the next three days so that I DO NOT MISS MY BROTHER'S WEDDING):The Other Side of the River by Alex Kotlowitz; Alice's Tulips by Sandra Dallas; Man and Boy by Tony Parsons; The Queen of the Big Time by Adriana Trigiani; Mrs. Mike by Benedict and Nancy Freedman; and The Scarlet Letter.

And that's what I have to say about books today. Now go read. It's good for your soul.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Will somebody please tell me why I spent over a week reading this 850-page book? I had read so many wonderful reviews on this book from the Sonlight Bibliovores forum. Some said that it was their favorite book/series ever. I have been trying to check it out from the library forever! But after reading this first one, I will resist the next 6 or so novels in this series by Diana Gabaldon. The storyline is yet another time-traveler one with absolutely none of the finesse of The Time Traveler's Wife. The rest of the book reads like a Scottish romance novel, with all the components you might expect in such a novel (and I mean all of the components). I kept reading because I had to figure out why so many people love this book. I am left dazed and confused.

A Thousand Splendid Suns takes place mainly in Kabul, Afghanistan and follows the lives of two women: Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man, and Laila, the beloved daughter of a family torn to shreds by the jihad. Beneath the burqa, these women struggle fiercely to survive, emotionally and physically. Integral to the story is Afghanistan and its people, whipped mercilessly by various power-hungry factions.

I read The Kite Runner not long ago and was absolutely blown away. A Thousand Splendid Suns does not disappoint as some second novels do. My only disappointment is that there are no more Hosseini novels to read--yet.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Booking Through Thursday is all about Harry Potter this week. If you want to play, you can leave a comment here or post on your own blog and comment at the BTT site.

1. Okay, love him or loathe him, you’d have to live under a rock not to know that J.K. Rowling’s final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, comes out on Saturday… Are you going to read it?

Absolutely! Harry Potter can be a taboo word in certain homeschooling circles. I had a friend once who actually hid the HP books on her bookshelf when she was hosting a homeschoolers’ meeting at her home so that she wouldn’t get “caught.” Isn’t that silly? I think the cartoon in my On Being Offensive post should end with: "And above all else, don't admit that you read Harry Potter!" One of my best friends and I laugh hysterically over a time when we had just met, and she started spouting off about the horrible HP books. I just looked and her and smiled, and she said, “Oh. Do you read them?” We love each other anyway…

2. If so, right away? Or just, you know, eventually, when you get around to it? Are you attending any of the midnight parties?

No, not right away. Dr. H. has first dibs. Jesse has second. And I will look forward to reading it while I’m on vacation in New York. And no midnight parties. That's just not our thing.

3. And, for the record… what do you think? Will Harry survive the series? What are you most looking forward to?

Yes, I think Harry will survive. I am most looking forward to that moment of perfect peace and quiet when I can crack open the book and enter Harry's world.

I like this book by Dodie Smith, author of several novels but known most for creating 101 Dalmatians. First of all, the narrator, Cassandra, is wonderfully smart and witty. This is her journal, in which she, at age 17, writes "partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how to write a novel--I intend to capture all our characters and put in conversations." The characters include her family, who live in poverty in a falling-down old English castle; their new American landlords; and various townspeople. Her journals record the amazing events that happen in one short year with the arrival of the American brothers, Simon and Neil.

The family itself is quirky in an Addam's Family kind of way. The father, Mortmain, was once a brilliant author, but for the past decade he has produced nothing (ergo earning no income), preferring instead to read detective novels all day. Older sister Rose longs to escape their poverty but sees no way out; younger brother Thomas goes about living a normal school boy's life. Topaz, the stepmother, makes it her goal to be Mortmain's muse while scrounging wildly to feed the family. And Cassandra observes and analyzes and ultimately steps out of childhood and becomes one of the characters.

I loved the spirit of timelessness captured in this novel. It reminds me somewhat of The Thirteenth Tale in that respect, although the overall mood is light and even romantic in a castle sort of way. It was an excellent novel for a bit of escapism. Also, I'd really like to live in a castle for just a little while.

Monday, July 16, 2007

This book by Sandra Dallas is just the right thing to read after a month of intense reads, including Holocaust-themed The Book Thief and Night. This is the fictional journal of Mattie Spenser, who receives and accepts an impromptu marriage proposal that requires moving from Iowa to the great Colorado Territory. The Civil War has just ended, and Mattie leaves her family and friends behind to follow this man she barely knows to the frontier. She chronicles their homesteading failures and successes, the people they meet in their tiny settlement, and her many heartaches and triumphs. I was willing to suspend my disbelief about all the tragedies that happened to her and her neighbors because I really wanted to. Yes, the novel could be deemed trite and formulaic, as one tragedy follows another and there was a great deal of dramatic foreshadowing. Still, when one's reading has been heavy, it's good to have something light and totally enjoyable (in spite of the tragedies). This is one of those reads. I'm a sucker for a spunky woman pioneer.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Subtitled "How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust," this memoir is the story of the author's life prior to the Holocaust and then during the war, as she became a "U-boat": an Austrian Jew who went underground and emerged in Munich as an Aryan. Author Edith Hahn Beer chronicles the amazing years of survival that demanded her to shed her former identity and live and work side-by-side with the despised Nazis.

The book starts with a slice of her life in Germany as a Red Cross nurse known as "Grete" and then tells the story of her previous life in Vienna, where she was just one examination away from becoming a lawyer before the Gestapo forced her family into the ghetto. Until the time when she received the yellow star on her chest, she hardly thought of herself as Jewish. "I think my father knew how to be Jewish, but he did not teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother's milk." Later in the book she describes one Hanukkah at the labor camp, when she and her fellow workers decided to make a menorah. "But then, to our horror, we found not one of us knew the prayer--not one. Can you imagine? To be so bereft, so ignorant of our own culture, our own liturgy! This was the legacy of our assimilated life in Vienna."

Edith spends a year in a labor camp and is then due to be deported. She decides then that she will risk capture to stay with her fiance in Vienna, and she rips off her yellow star and goes into hiding. Eventually her boyfriend, out of terror, ends things with her, and she flees to Munich with a new identity. Once in Germany, she takes on a whole new self.

This book, which was on my list for Semicolon's Saturday Book Review challenge, is heartwrenching and fascinating. She is a powerful writer and succeeds in relating to the reader how people will do impossible things to survive and to protect those they love.

Subtitled "How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust," this memoir is the story of the author's life prior to the Holocaust and then during the war, as she became a "U-boat": an Austrian Jew who went underground and emerged in Munich as an Aryan. Author Edith Hahn Beer chronicles the amazing years of survival that demanded her to shed her former identity and live and work side-by-side with the despised Nazis.

The book starts with a slice of her life in Germany as a Red Cross nurse known as "Grete" and then tells the story of her previous life in Vienna, where she was just one examination away from becoming a lawyer before the Gestapo forced her family into the ghetto. Until the time when she received the yellow star on her chest, she hardly thought of herself as Jewish. "I think my father knew how to be Jewish, but he did not teach us. He must have thought we would absorb it with our mother's milk." Later in the book she describes one Hanukkah at the labor camp, when she and her fellow workers decided to make a menorah. "But then, to our horror, we found not one of us knew the prayer--not one. Can you imagine? To be so bereft, so ignorant of our own culture, our own liturgy! This was the legacy of our assimilated life in Vienna."

Edith spends a year in a labor camp and is then due to be deported. She decides then that she will risk capture to stay with her fiance in Vienna, and she rips off her yellow star and goes into hiding. Eventually her boyfriend, out of terror, ends things with her, and she flees to Munich with a new identity. Once in Germany, she takes on a whole new self.

This book, which was on my list for Semicolon's Saturday Book Review challenge, is heartwrenching and fascinating. She is a powerful writer and succeeds in relating to the reader how people will do impossible things to survive and to protect those they love.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

I've joined a weekly meme because everyone else seems to have a weekly group meme, and I don't like to miss anything. So my new meme of choice is called Booking Through Thursday, in which bloggers respond to specific literature-oriented questions. This week's questions are:

1. In your opinion, what is the best translation of a book to a movie?2. The worst?3. Had you read the book before seeing the movie, and did that make a difference?

I am going to be teaching an American Literature class to our homeschooling co-op this fall, and I plan to have one night each month in which we watch movies adapted from the novels they are reading. Recently I’ve been previewing movies made from classic American literature, so I’ll stick with those for this.

1. I thought the 1992 Of Mice and Men, directed by Gary Sinise and starring Sinise and John Malkovich, was excellent. I have to say it has been years—okay, maybe close to two decades—since I last read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, so I can’t say how much the movie deviated from the book; however, nothing jumped out at me that made me say, “Hey! That didn’t happen like that!” The movie itself was absolutely wonderful.

2. On the other hand, 1995’s The Scarlet Letter barely qualifies of an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel. (To give the directors their due, the movie does state at the beginning that it is “freely adapted from the novel.”) The only real similarities between the book and the movie are the names of the main characters and the location. Demi Moore turned Hawthorne’s humble and repentant Hester Prynne into a Puritan rebel who more than earns the “R” rating.

3. I had read both books long before seeing the movies—and loved both books. I was specifically watching the movies with two criteria in mind: 1) Is the movie acceptable for teens to watch? And 2) Does the movie follow the novel closely? I expect some deviation, and I think that makes for good discussion; but I want at least a close adaptation. Of Mice and Men was an excellent adaptation, although the language was rather strong. The Scarlet Letter didn’t even come close to fitting the bill on either point.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

We read Charles Martin's When Crickets Cry for book club earlier this year, and I thought it was absolutely wonderful. Wrapped in Rain was an irritating start for me. Martin got off track by telling side stories of characters that weren't central to the book, and this distracted me. It was as if he had a great slice-of-life that he had to get in somewhere, so he squeezed it into this book. Bad idea. His writing in the first half of the book was too trite--he was trying too hard to be clever. (I recognize this pattern because I did it myself in graduate school. And Jane Smiley is not nearly so nice of a critic as I am.) But by the middle of the story, Martin hit his rhythm, leaving behind the pseudo-cleverness and just concentrating on the story itself. And the story itself was wonderful.

One of Martin's good qualities is that he is a Christian writer who doesn't shove sermons down his reader's throat. This novel focuses on two brothers and a neighborhood girl, all now in their 30s. They all have demons to deal with (mental illness, abusive father, abusive husband), and the words of the now-dead Miss Ella, the boys' caretaker/mother, continue to guide them. This is a great feel-good read but not too sappy, with a main characters you just really like. Wrapped in Rain is on my list for the Saturday Book Review challenge.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

I am having a very good week with re-reading classics of American Literature: Ethan Frome, The Red Pony, and now John Knowles' A Separate Peace. This coming-of-age story takes place in an exclusive boys' boarding school right before the U.S. enters WWII. Gene and Phinneas are best friends: Gene has book smarts and Phinneas has everything else, including a magnetic personality that makes him easily the king of the campus. The pending war--and their possible enlistment--hangs over the boys, at times terrifying but most often as a potential adventure. Their lives are changed forever in a split second, in the frightening way that a simple act of aggression can cause irreparable harm. The fall from innocence is brutal and complete, severing them all from the blissful world of academics to the hard world of loss, guilt, anger, and war. Knowles is a beautiful writer, his language concise but poetic. This will be included on my list of required reading for my upcoming American Lit class.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Back in my early 20s I used to read through authors. I not only read through nearly everything John Steinbeck wrote, but I also scanned dusty shelves of many a thrift store to complete my personal Steinbeck collection. A particular thrill for me was that, during this Steinbeck extravaganza, I was fortunate enough to drive cross-country from Tennessee to California with my parents. We visited Monterey and its Cannery Row and even saw lots of downtrodden men with a bottles in brown bags, which truly gave an authentic Steinbeck feel to the whole day.

Naturally a Steinbeck novel is essential reading for my American Lit class next year, and I'd narrowed the choices down to Of Mice and Men, The Pearl, and The Red Pony. As of now, The Red Pony is in the lead. I haven't yet re-read Of Mice and Men, but The Red Pony is just such a perfect novel. First published in 1937, this short novel is composed of four separate vignettes in the life of the boy Jody. Through the story Jody faces the hard realities of death, heartbreak, and cruelty but also experiences wild joy, a longing for adventure, and a certainty of his own identity.

Steinbeck is a master of character description, using his trademark sparse language to drill home those universal human truths. There is a wonderful scene in the second chapter, "The Great Mountains," in which Jody, angry at the death of his horse, kills a bird out of sheer meanness. This line follows ends that scene: "He didn't care about the bird, or its life, but he knew what older people would say if they had seen him kill it; he was ashamed because of their potential opinion." There are all kinds of treasures in the same vein throughout the book that will make for great class discussion.

This book by Benedict and Nancy Freedman has been on my reading list for a few years, but our library doesn't have it. (I ultimately got it through paperbackswap.com.) And after reading it, I am absolutely amazed that our library doesn't carry this absolute gem of a book which, according to the many reviews I've read since, is an incredibly well-loved book! The story: Katherine Mary O'Fallon, a sickly sixteen-year-old, is shipped off to Canada at the recommendation of her doctor. She leaves Boston to live with her uncle in the Canadian wilderness. Within a short time she meets and marries Canadian Mountie Mike Flannigan, and the rest of the book is about their life together in rugged and remote Alberta in the early 1900s. Mike and Kathy cope with all kinds of tragedies and adventures, and their love story is vibrant and palpable. An absolutely wonderful book!

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

For the first time ever I've encountered a reading challenge that I can master. Sherry at Semicolon posts a fabulous Saturday Review of Books each week. Her challenge is to read 6 books from this list between now and December 31. Several of these books are on my reading list anyway, but I've picked up a few extras. I've also picked more than six in case any aren't available at the library between now and then.